The World on Leverage: Geopolitics at Its Minsky Moment

The world never enters its great catastrophes by stumbling into disorder.
It slides into them, carried by the opposite illusion: that of stability.

Hyman Minsky grasped this paradox at the heart of financial systems: the longer an order endures, the more it endangers itself. Safety breeds risk-taking; risk-taking becomes the norm; the norm manufactures collapse. The “Minsky moment” is not the instant when everything falls apart—it is the moment when we realize that everything was already hollow, already vain.

This mechanism does not belong to markets alone. It now governs geopolitics.

Major financial crises are never born of excessive fear, but of excessive confidence. They arise when a system has functioned smoothly for so long that its participants come to believe risk has vanished. Balance sheets grow heavy, safety margins erode, safeguards become decorative. Markets keep rising, not because value is real, but because everyone is convinced that someone else will pay tomorrow. When the shock comes, it is never the cause of the collapse—it is merely its revealer.

Geopolitics in 2026 stands in precisely this condition.

As before 1929 or 2008, the world still functions. Trade continues, summits are held, communiqués reassure. Beneath the surface, however, the shock absorbers have disappeared. Arms-control treaties are eroding like forgotten prudential rules. Once the backbone of the system, deterrence has been replaced by incantations. Supply chains are becoming invisible front lines. Frozen conflicts accumulate like toxic assets on a global balance sheet.

Each power now behaves like a bank “too big to fail”: convinced that the system cannot afford its collapse, it takes ever greater risks. Russia bets on Western fatigue. China bets on the erosion of the liberal order. The United States bets on the resilience of its centrality. Each piles up its positions, each increases its strategic leverage, each assumes the other will blink.

We now stand squarely within a political economy of “too big to fail” applied to states.

As in any financial crisis, the moment will come when this belief collapses. A seemingly minor event will reveal that no one truly has the capacity to absorb the shock. Liquidity will vanish, confidence will reverse, and what appeared solid will prove hollow. In 2026, global geopolitics is structured in the same way: highly interconnected, thinly capitalized in real trust, dependent on rules that are obeyed only by inertia. A local military incident, a strategic rupture, a diplomatic breakdown will play the role of systemic failure—not because it is decisive in itself, but because it will reveal that no one is truly guaranteeing the system.

This will be the world’s Minsky moment: the brutal transition from an order that seemed natural to the discovery that it was nothing more than a collective wager.

History appeared to have lost its brutality; the neoliberal order seemed irreversible; war between great powers obsolete. Globalization was supposed to neutralize violence, interdependence to dissolve rivalries, moral norms to replace deterrence. Tragedy seemed to have left the stage.

This stability did not pacify the world—it made it fragile.

Alliances expanded without their costs being assumed. Armies were reduced in favor of comfort. Energy and industrial dependencies were treated as conveniences. Conflicts were frozen, as if freezing abolished pressure. Deterrence dissolved into the language of values. The Western world began to confuse norm with force, law with power, intention with capacity.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, observers learned. They understood that fear of escalation had become structural. They discovered that the economy could be a weapon. They tested red lines—and those lines, in fact, receded. Each tolerated transgression widened the field of the possible. Each unresolved crisis validated the next. As in a financial bubble, every survival of the system reinforced the illusion of its invulnerability.

Our naïve and candid world has now entered its terminal phase:
the phase in which everything still holds—only because everyone believes it always will.

Crises no longer succeed one another; they pile up. A European war without an end. A Sino-American rivalry that has become the axis of the century. The gradual disappearance of nuclear safeguards. The irreversible fragmentation of the global economy. The internal polarization of societies. The proliferation of actors capable of striking at the heart of the system.

This is no longer a world of balances. It is a non-linear world, where a local incident can become a global shock, where a tactical error can unleash a historical cascade. Reality has changed its nature: welcome to structural instability.

The geopolitical Minsky moment is therefore not ahead of us. It is already underway. The question is no longer whether the order born in 1991 will break, but through what shock it will reveal that it is already dead.

There is no longer any gentle transition. Middle powers are losing their room for maneuver. Blocs are hardening. Thresholds are blurring. And rules are becoming optional.